XolaBot Lightning Deals

XolaBot's Lightning Deals feature allows you to offer last-minute promotions on your website automatically. Our automated marketing bot, XolaBot, lives on your website and engages visitors to drive conversions and increase revenue.

What's covered in this article:

• Getting Started with Lightning Deals
• How to configure Lightning Deals
• Examples of configurations to use
  • Increase utilization for distressed inventory
  • Increase purchases for specific times of the day or days of the week
• Page-specific display 
• XolaBot Lightning Deals Customer View 

Getting Started with Lightning Deals

There are two main ways to use Lightning Deals:

1. Increase occupancy for distressed inventory. Distressed inventory is when you have a time slot with an approaching arrival time, and there aren't many or any purchases yet.
   • • For example, let's say that you have a tour time coming up in 12 hours that can accommodate 16 people, but only 2 people are reserved (12.5% utilized). That could be considered distressed inventory, and Lightning Deals could offer last-minute deals to incentivize website visitors to purchase distressed inventory. This will ultimately allow you to increase purchases during times that aren't as popular. You define what qualifies as distressed inventory when setting up Lightning Deals. 
2. Increase purchases for specific times of the day or days of the week. If your business has typically slow times of the week or day, you can use Lightning Deals to only offer discounts for time slots that fall during your less busy times.
   • • For example, you could set up a Lightning Deal that invites people to reserve for 15% off on weekdays before 5 pm.

To set up your Lightning Deals, you must first enable them from the App Store and then configure your preferences.

1. Navigate to the Xola App Store.
2. Locate XolaBot Lightning Deals and select the App Store tile.
3. Click the green Install button
4. Or go to Marketing > XolaBot > Apps > XolaBot. Next to XolaBot - Lightning Deals, click Install.

How to configure Lightning Deals

1. Now go to Settings > Apps> Xolabot Lightning Deals> Configure
2. Once on the settings page, you have the following configuration options:
   • Lightning deals allows you to promote one coupon at a time.
     • Coupon: The specific parameters of the Lightning Deal are based on the discount coupon campaign you select. From here, you have two options:
       • Option 1: From the drop-down list, select an existing coupon.
       • Option 2: Go to Marketing > Coupons and create a discount coupon specifically for this Lightning Deal. The new coupon must be discount-style. Learn more about setting up a coupon campaign here.

Note: The experiences selected in the coupon campaign will be used for the Lightning Deal. So you will be able to have Lightning Deals for multiple experiences. 

• • Delay: This is the number of seconds after someone lands on your site before XolaBot offers the Lightning Deals. For example, if it is set to 3, then the lightning deal will be shown 3 seconds after the visitor lands on your site. 
  • Minimum capacity utilization: Capacity utilization refers to the percentage of a time slot that is reserved. For example, if a tour time can take 12 people, and 3 are already reserved, then the capacity utilization is 25%. Lightning Deals will allow you to specify the range in which time slots will be shown. If you select the minimum to be 0% and the maximum to be 50%, then only time slots that are less than half reserved will be offered as Lightning Deals.

Note: XolaBot does not recognize time slots without purchases. Therefore, a time slot must have at least one purchase to be eligible as a lightning deal.

• Maximum capacity utilization: This sets the maximum of the capacity utilization range. 
• Duration before the event: This allows you to specify how far in advance of a time slot a Lightning Deal will be shown. For example, if you set it to 24 hours, then any time slot within 24 hours and the capacity utilization range will be displayed. However, if a time slot is more than 24 hours away, then Lightning Deals will never show it. This ensures that people are not able to purchase your last-minute lightning deals weeks in advance. 

Examples of configurations to use

You can configure Lightning Deals to match your business needs best. Please keep reading to see examples of the two main ways to use XolaBot Lightning Deals.

Increase utilization for distressed inventory

This use case is geared toward using Lightning Deals primarily to fill underutilized time slots. It is well-suited if you are looking to offer a discount at any time of the day or week, so long as the time slot meets your capacity utilization settings.

We suggest first looking at the Capacity Utilization report. If you don't have this enabled, you can search the Xola App Store, search for Capacity Utilization, and enable the app.

1. Now, go to Reports> Capacity Utilization
2. Select the experience for which you want to offer Lightning Deals and your last month of data. You'll see something like this:

This allows you to easily visualize low or no-capacity time slots to get a sense of how offering Lightning Deals for distressed inventory could increase purchases for those time slots.

A possible Lightning Deals configuration might look like this if you wanted to incentivize website visitors to book distressed inventory.

• Coupon: 25% off discount coupon that applies to the Historical Downtown Tour product
• Delay: 1 second (which will show almost immediately)
• Minimum capacity utilization: 0%
• Maximum capacity utilization: 50%
• Duration before the event: 5 Days

In this setup, any time slot within 5 days and under 50% reserved will receive a one-time offer for 25% off. You could get a bit fancier and set up the coupon associated with this Lightning Deal to be offered only on weekdays. This prevents Lightning Deals from being offered for time slots during the weekend!

These are just some ideas to get you started. Each business is unique, and you will have the best idea of what configuration makes the most sense for your business.

Increase purchases for specific times of the day or days of the week

Lightning Deals can be restricted based on the parameters of the coupon campaign, which allows you to base your Lightning Deals on time of day or day of the week rather than, or in addition to, capacity utilization. For example, if you only want to show Lightning Deal time slots for your weekday morning time slots, all you need to do is adjust the coupon arrival times to something along these lines:

Perhaps you might want to configure Lightning Deals with something like this:

• Coupon: 25% off discount coupon.
• Delay: 1 second (which will show almost immediately)
• Minimum capacity utilization: 0%
• Maximum capacity utilization: 50%
• Duration before the event: 2 weeks

With this setup, we are extending the duration before the event to 2 weeks, which offers more opportunities to fill our weekday morning time slots. A campaign like this would be helpful for businesses that are very busy on weekday nights and weekends but struggle to bring people in during regular business hours.  

Note: Some website platforms (CMS) limit external Javascript, which may mean you cannot use XolaBot. i.e. GoDaddy's free website builder.

Page-specific display 

You can now capture what page you want XolaBot displayed on. This feature allows you to enter URLs to either allow or block XolaBot from your webpages.

1. Go to Marketing > XolaBot > Settings
2. Configure URLs to be displayed across your website, allowed on specific URLs, or blocked from particular URLs.

XolaBot Lightning Deals Customer View 

When someone lands on your website, they will be offered a Lightning Deal if it fits the settings that you configure. Here is how it will look from your customers' perspective. 

These are the steps the customer must act on before they go to the Xola online checkout window:

1.  The customers are asked if they are interested in a Lightning Deal. The copy is: "Hi! We’re offering some last-minute ⚡deals. Are you interested in learning more?"
   • They have two options to pick from:
     • YES, PLEASE: This will bring them to the following prompt, where they can select the number of people in their reservation.
     • NO, THANKS: This will mark the message as read, and it will go away.
2. If they hit YES, PLEASE, the customers are shown the discount offer and asked to select their party size.
   • The messaging is: "Fantastic! We may be able to offer you up to X% off your booking. How many people are in your group?" The discount messaging is based on the coupon campaign you have chosen.
3. Next, they will be presented with buttons where they can select the size of their party. This ensures they are only shown time slots that can accommodate their group size.
4. After that, the visitor is presented with the available times.
5. Once they select a time slot, the Xola purchase window opens, and their discount is automatically applied.
6. The customer will continue the transaction as normal.